JOSEPH CONRAD.

Shannon News, 26 August 1924, Page 2

JOSEPH CONRAD.

A MASTER OF ENGLISH. By the death of Joseph Conrad, modern .English literature has lost a man who has brought more to it Ulan any of his fellows. Of all British novelists he was the oue alone who caught the spirit of the sea and made it live in his writings. His readers became the steadfast friends of strange men, who dwelt in strange islands that studded strange tropic seas. So vivid and picturesque was his writings that these scenes were all brought to life before the reader’s eyes, and they became, through him, privileged travellers iiu lands unknown to them. In novel form and in short story he obtained these effects with unerring accuracy. Joseph Conrad was born in Poland on December .6, 1857. His natal name was not Conrad, but some Polish equivalent to that. At an early age he went to sea., and worked before the mast. After years of labour he .eventually became a master in the Merchant Service, and it was on one oi the trips made in his ship that he met John Galsworthy, the man who changed the course of his life. Conrad spoke his native language till he was twenty, but then he begau to learn English, and within a few years he could write better than the majority of the men who were born to the tongue. Galsworthy has said that the thing that first ma<de him realise that Conrad had something in him, was the picturesque way in which he swore. He excelled all liis fellows in tlie service, and those who knew seafearing men wall*realise how great a talent would be required to do that. t On the voyage, which was a long one Galsworthy learned that Conrad had written a novel, and it was due to Galsworthy’s . encouragement that it was published some time afterwards under the title of “Almayer’s Folly.” It met with success, and after he had published several other books he left the sea fbr ever and settled down in England to the life of an author.

■ In the Turnbull Library in Wellington there is & copy of the first edition of “Almayer’s Folly,” and in it Konrad has written a note to the effect that he does not know what strange force urged him to the writing, and that nobody was more amazed than he was at the production of the book.

Conrad has his thousands of readers throughout the English-speaking World and in addition his works have been colourlessly . translated into several European languages. Some people say that they cannot enjoy him because of his minute dissection of character, but for all that they admit that as a writer he is without peer in modem England.